From our colonial past to the present, the monster in all its various forms has been a staple of American culture. A masterful survey of our grim and often disturbing past, Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity.Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers, new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous "other" not only reflects society's fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.

    The idea of “the heterosexual” was unprecedented. After all, men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and sometimes even falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, “heterosexual” had become a byword for “normal,” enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. With an eclectic scope and fascinating detail, Straight tells the eye-opening story of a complex and often contradictory man-made creation that turns out to be anything but straight or narrow.

    But, like butterflies must first be caterpillars, becoming a big boy or girl doesn’t happen overnight.In this funny rhyming story for children aged 3 to 7 years old, children will laugh at the illustrations and the extremes that our little dragon friend goes to, as he tries to breathe fire for the first time. After trying so hard with no luck at all, he meets a wise owl who tells him that his Mom has all the answers. This humorous story was created with the intention of helping young children to understand that life is magic. But, just like real magic, you never really know when it will happen!

    Bruno Latour's contention is that the word "social" as used by Social Scientists has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become a misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as "wooden" or "steely".Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling: and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why "the social" cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a "social explanation" of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of "the social" to redefine the notion and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the "assemblages" of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a "sociology of associations" has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network-Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.

    Through a powerful combination of cultural analysis and memoir, this stunningly original book explores why cancer remains so confounding, despite the billions of dollars spent in the search for a cure. Amidst furious debates over its causes and treatments, scientists generate reams of data—information that ultimately obscures as much as it clarifies. Award-winning anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain deftly unscrambles the high stakes of the resulting confusion. Expertly reading across a range of material that includes history, oncology, law, economics, and literature, Jain explains how a national culture that simultaneously aims to deny, profit from, and cure cancer entraps us in a state of paradox—one that makes the world of cancer virtually impossible to navigate for doctors, patients, caretakers, and policy makers alike. This chronicle, burning with urgency and substance leavened with brio and wit, offers a lucid guide to understanding and navigating the quicksand of uncertainty at the heart of cancer. Malignant vitally shifts the terms of an epic battle we have been losing for decades: the war on cancer.

    But the factions on the mother ship hovering above the planet may create an unintended chaos for both the life on the planet and the humans exploring it. As the anger increases on the ship, the ground crew becomes more and more affected by the conflict and begins to rely on their instincts to keep the project moving forward. Unexpected danger plagues the mission as Lixia is determined to expand her knowledge.

    Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization.Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

    The Insiders lead a privileged existence: never having to leave their homes, they enjoy a vastly prolonged lifespan, a regular supply of food and mind-altering drugs, and holographic entertainment at the push of a button. Meanwhile, the Outsiders, half-savage, inhabit a polluted wilderness of ruins and industrial waste, struggling for survival.Uncumber has been warned never to go outside. But when she meets an Outsider on the Holovision and falls in love with him, she becomes curious and decides to venture out into the world . . .Equal parts dystopian science fiction and brilliant social satire, Michael Frayn’s eerily prescient fourth novel A Very Private Life (1968) earned widespread critical acclaim and comparisons to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This edition features a new introduction by the author.WHAT CRITICS ARE SAYING‘A weird and frightening intensity.’ – Time ‘Easily the most original thing Frayn has done . . . written with elegant simplicity.’ – New Statesman‘An ingenious fable . . . at times poetically imaginative.’ – Sunday Times‘An intriguing fantasy.’ – Sunday Telegraph

    

    Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.

    It would appear that the formula: IQ+Effort=Merit may well constitute the basic belief of the ruling class in the twenty-first century. Projecting himself into the year 2034, the author of this sociological satire shows how present decisions and practices may remold our society.It is widespread knowledge that it is insufficient to be somebody's nephew to obtain a responsible post in business, government, teaching, or science. Experts in education and selection apply scientific principles to sift out the leaders of tomorrow. You need intelligence rating, qualification, experience, application, and a certain caliber to achieve status. In a word, one must show merit to advance in the new society of tomorrow.In a new opening essay, Young reflects on the reception of his work, and its production, in a candid and lively way. Many of the critical ambiguities surrounding its original publication are now clarified and resolved. What we have is what the Guardian of London called "A brilliant essay." and what Time and Tide described as "a fountain gush of new ideas. Its wit and style make it compulsively enjoyable reading from cover to cover."

    It is an enquiry into the roots of present day middle class culture, as it developed between about 1880 and 1910 in Sweden. As their starting point the authors have taken the middle class virtues that are recognizable in the stereotype of the typical Swede: the nature-loving and conflict-avoiding person, obsessed with self-discipline, punctuality, orderliness and the importance of living a rational life. From this stereotype, the industrial and professional middle classes are easily recognizable as the ones who have defined the dominant ideas about the good and proper life. In summary, this book describes 'the process through which middle-class culture building moved from the position of counter-culture to dominant culture and then to national culture, and finally became invisible as ideas about human nature' (Löfgren 198 :81). This process however, is not typical for Sweden alone (which may have been the reason why the authors do not refer to Sweden in their title), but since the book deals with Sweden only, the title is somewhat misleading. The question as to what is typically Swedish, their national character or identity, is not seriously raised, because any comparison with developments in other countries is absent. This means that it is impossible to get an impression or estimation, however rough, of the ways or degrees in which the typical Swede differs, for instance in conflict-avoidance, from other national identities or stereotypes

    Five actual journal articles are reproduced in the appendix as examples of the different research designs.

    Why are our children so terrified to be called nerds? And what is the cost of this rising tide of anti-intellectualism to both our children and our nation? In Nerds, family psychotherapist and psychology professor David Anderegg examines why science and engineering have become socially poisonous disciplines, why adults wink at the derision of nerdy kids, and what we can do to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly high-tech world. Nerds takes a measured look at how we think about and why we should rethink nerds, examining such topics as: - our anxiety about intense interest in things mechanical or technological; - the pathologizing of nerdy behavior with diagnoses such as Asperger syndrome; - the cycle of anti-nerd prejudice that took place after the Columbine incident; - why nerds are almost exclusively an American phenomenon; - the archetypal struggles of nerds and jocks in American popular culture and history; - the conformity of adolescents and why adolescent stereotypes linger into adulthood long after we should know better; and nerd cultural markers, particularly science fiction. Using education research, psychological theory, and interviews with nerdy and non-nerdy kids alike, Anderegg argues that we stand in dire need of turning around the big dumb ship of American society to prepare rising generations to compete in the global marketplace.

    Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.